Description

This document is aimed at professional fire engineers and others interested in the application of New Zealand Building Code Clauses C1 to C6: Protection from Fire and Verification Method C/VM2.

It includes commentary on Clauses C1 to C6 and their subclauses, additional guidance for applying the Verification Method, and some insight into its development. C/VM2 is intended to provide a robust and consistent design methodology for specific design that allows creative and flexible fire engineering solutions.

It sets out a number of prescribed design scenarios against which the fire engineer must test his or her designs.

Scope

This document does not provide a comprehensive, technical justification of the values selected for use in Clauses C1 to C6 and Verification Method C/VM2.

For a start, the fire research community simply has not provided methodologies for addressing many of the design issues faced in common engineering practice. In fact, there are a number of historic values within all of the international codes that are commonly accepted but have no technical basis.

When developing the fire safety design framework, the working group’s approach was as follows:

• When there was obvious analysis available to support the chosen values in the existing Compliance Documents, it would first consider those existing Compliance Documents, and
• In other cases, it would investigate the approach of overseas building codes. Some of the reasoning behind the working group’s final decisions is included in later sections.